Red Hat OpenShift on VMware

As software developer demands conform to experiences delivered by the cloud, IT operations and platform engineering teams are challenged to deliver the speed, agility, portability, and scale to satisfy developer needs, without compromising the security features and visibility required by IT operations. While customers have the flexibility to run containers in the cloud, at the edge, or on bare metal on premises, most modern infrastructures are virtualized. Often the easiest and most efficient way to get started with containers today is to run containerized workloads on top of a bare metal virtualization platform. 

Explore containers and virtual machines

Containers encapsulate an application and its dependencies, isolating them from the rest of the system and ensuring consistency across development, testing, and production environments. Containers share the same operating system kernel and isolate application processes, enabling lightweight, portable workloads. They improve development agility, accelerate deployment, and respond quickly to business needs.

Kubernetes was developed to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containers. Built and deployed by one of the largest open source communities, Kubernetes is made up of over 88,000 contributors. Kubernetes powers Red Hat® OpenShift®, a comprehensive cloud-native platform to build, deploy, and run traditional and modern applications.

If you’re new to Kubernetes, read about the benefits and challenges and how Red Hat OpenShift simplifies the management of Kubernetes deployments on-premise or in the cloud.

Containers and VMs offer different approaches to packaging application and computing environments and isolating them from the rest of an IT system. They can be used together in many configurations, such as container-native virtualization, which allows you to run and manage VM workloads alongside container workloads, or on top of one another as explained below. 

Running containers via Red Hat OpenShift on VMware comes with a host of benefits. Resource management is one example. Rather than dedicate entire bare metal infrastructure nodes to your container workloads, you can spin up a virtual cluster quickly, and if you need more resources, you can scale up worker nodes with a click of a button. You can also deliver a multitenant environment by giving each user their own cluster, confined only by their cluster's resources, and scale incrementally as needed. Red Hat OpenShift also automatically integrates the vSphere Container Storage Plug-in, which simplifies storage orchestration by using local VMware datastores to provide persistent storage.

Additionally, Red Hat OpenShift provides automated installation, upgrades, and lifecycle management across the entire container stack—including the operating system, applications, Kubernetes and cluster services—enabling customers to reduce operational complexity, save time, and ensure consistency across environments. With a strong focus on security at every layer of the container stack and throughout the application lifecycle, Red Hat OpenShift empowers teams to build quickly and with agility, confidence, and flexibility. In addition to providing an extremely versatile platform, Red Hat also offers long-term enterprise support for OpenShift releases.

Operating a Red Hat OpenShift environment with virtualized infrastructure can be an improvement over the management of traditional IT infrastructure on bare metal because the demand for resources often fluctuates with business needs, and traditional infrastructure can leave Red Hat OpenShift clusters either under-powered or over-provisioned. A virtualized infrastructure offers a more flexible, scalable, and secure infrastructure to handle the ever-changing demands of the business and its associated application workloads by allowing the instantaneous scaling upward or downward of an OpenShift cluster as workloads demand by spawning or removing additional virtual worker nodes.

Regardless of where you run it, Red Hat OpenShift operates the same—on VMware solutions, on premises in a local data center or at the edge. 

Red Hat OpenShift and VMware vSphere offer a strong combination for running an enterprise container platform on a virtual infrastructure. For many years, our joint customers have successfully deployed Red Hat OpenShift on VMware for their production-ready container-based applications.

Download our guide to self-managed OpenShift

VMware Cloud Foundation brings together separate datacenter functions—compute, storage, networking, and cloud management—into a single platform and can be set up in a private cloud on-premises or used as a service in a public cloud. When combined with Red Hat OpenShift, the leader in enterprise Kubernetes containerization, VMware Cloud Foundation enhances your app development stack by delivering a secure, scalable, and adaptable platform. Red Hat OpenShift deployed on top of VCF provides a robust, security-first application environment, enabling teams to build, deploy, and manage containerized applications with confidence. VMware Cloud Foundation complements this with advanced networking capabilities through VMware NSX, including micro-segmentation, which isolates workloads, minimizes security risks, and optimizes network efficiency.

This combination empowers organizations to streamline operations, improve security postures, and accelerate application development across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Red Hat and VMware have been technology partners for years. Red Hat delivers full stack automation of vSphere deployments with Red Hat OpenShift. With full-stack automation, the installer has control of infrastructure provisioning with an opinionated best practices deployment on Red Hat OpenShift for an even faster initial setup experience on vSphere.

For more customized deployments, Red Hat offers guidance on pre-existing infrastructure through a clear, supported path to run Red Hat OpenShift on-premises and in hybrid cloud deployments with their public cloud instances. Red Hat also offers agent-based installation as well as the Assisted Installer, which supports the various deployment platforms with a focus on bare metal and vSphere infrastructures.